Beckman Institute            University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign              University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Learning Object Categories

Faculty contact: Brian H. Ross.

This research line investigates the mental processes by which we divide the world of objects into categories; the method used is to require subjects to learn new, experimenter-defined categories.

In these experiments, participants learn to divide a set of unfamiliar objects into two categories. The objects differ from one another along various dimensions: shape, color, pattern, and so on. The experimenter defines a rule that determines whether any given object in the set belongs to category A or category B; to take a very simple example, category A might consist of all of the yellow objects and all other objects would belong to category B.

Subject studying a novel object

The participant is shown one object at a time (Fig. 1, which represents the participant's view of the virtual world).

Subject assigning the object to one of two categories

He or she initially has to guess which category to assign the object to (category A or B) by dragging it into the appropriate bin (Fig. 2). After each trial feedback is provided about whether the assignment was right or wrong. The participant continues to do this task until he or she is able to sort the objects correctly.

The experimenter varies the category rules or the response the subject makes in order to study the processes by which categories are learned and used.
Spatial Memory Across Viewpoints Cube Experiments Main Page Spatial Updating in Complex Environments

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